Whomp Power

I believe they talked about this site on All Things Considered today. I heard the promo and looked it up, and I am fascinated.

Here is the gist (found it at the bottom of the site, as well as the address and some tips if you are so inspired): "You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to the PostSecret project. Each secret can be a regret, hope, belief, experience, fear, betrayal, desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before."

Just log on to Postsecret and start reading. The secrets can be benign, others bring the bearer shame and self loathing. All are beautiful.

This one I can't stop thinking about.

"The moral progress of a nation can be judged by the way it treats its animals." -- Ghandi

Dr. Lindsay Allen of the US Agricultural Research Service, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that a "vegan diet was so lacking in necessary nutrients that it is tantamount to child abuse". Allen states "If you're talking about feeding young children, pregnant women and lactating women, I would go as far as to say it is unethical to withhold these foods [animal source foods] during that period of life" and "there's absolutely no question that it's unethical for parents to bring up their children as strict vegans".

Ok, wow. Those are some powerful statements. Lets see how she came to those conclusions. In short, she went to Africa and divided 544 malnourished children into four groups who currently subsisted on a low-nutrition diet of corn and beans. Over two years, she gave some two ounces of meat, some a cup of milk, some an oil supplement, and some she continued to let starve to death. The kids who got more food saw an improvement in their health. Therefore, veganism is child abuse. If she had given the kids (1)vitamins, (2) whole grains and leafy green vegetables (3) candy bars... don't you think they would have done better as well?

As this article points out, "one of the more appalling aspects of this is that they are experimenting on starving children. These are kids who are clearly starving, they are not eating a "vegan" diet but a starvation diet. And yet these meat industry "researchers" don't feed the starving, they don't give them enough food, they do some weird pro-animal food experiment to try to twist it into a political point to help the bottom line of the meat industry.

Imagine 554 children in rural Wyoming are eating a starvation diet that consists almost exclusively of beans and corn. As a result, many of them have stunted growth and are underweight. Nearly all of them suffer from a broad array of malnutrition-related illnesses. How many of them do you feed? All of them? Or do you decide to conduct an experiment to see what happens if you feed some and let the others continue to suffer for a couple of years?

You'd feed all of them, of course. In the United States, deliberately starving children for research purposes is a criminal act that would provoke justifiable outrage. Unfortunately for the children in Dr. Allen's study, they were in Kenya."

You may have noticed the bits I italicized above. That is because this study was sponsored by the National Cattleman's Beef Association. So not only do the torture cattle for profit, the torture children as well. What a fucked up piece of work.

Here are some articles that support vegan diets in pregnancy and childhood:
The Vegan Diet During Pregnancy and Lactation
Feeding Vegan Kids
Vegan Children

In an article related only by torture, it seems our esteemed Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was quite an animal lover back in the day. As the article states: "everything you need to know about this unpleasant man was contained in one short paragraph of a profile of Frist by Michael Kranish in the Boston Globe Sunday magazine for Oct. 27, 2002, when Frist was in Boston, first at Harvard Medical School and then at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"Frist is an animal lover who said his decision to become a doctor was clinched when he helped heal a friend's dog. But Frist now found himself forced to kill animals during medical research. And his new dilemma was finding enough animals to kill. Soon, he began lying to obtain more animals. He went to the animal shelters around Boston and promised he would care for the cats as pets. Then he killed them during experiments. 'It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do,' Frist wrote. 'I was going a little crazy.'"

I'm sure Frist will be first in line to stop the CIA from flying suspects to more "torture-friendly" countries for interrogation.

Unbefuckinglievable.

Trying is the first step towards failure.

An artist going by the name Banksy smuggled in and hung his art in four NY museums on March 13th. He hung his art in the Brooklyn Museum, The Met, MOMA, and the Museum of Natural History.

"He said the painting in the Metropolitan Museum, a small portrait of a woman wearing a gas mask, had been discovered after one day, while the others stayed up for several days. The paintings were fixed to the wall with extra-strong glue. Asked how he managed to escape notice while putting them up on a busy Sunday at the museums, he said: "They do get pretty full, but not if you put the pictures in the boring bits."

There is more on this story at Wooster Collective, a site I discovered because of the above article and it appears to be very cool. You can even buy a coloring book. Go here to see pics of Banksy in action, as well as patrons admiring his work. Banksy's got his own site as well.

Finally, I hope everyone has a happy easter.

O has discovered the joy of knock knock jokes. They range from the ridiculous to the sublime, and are generally accompanied by a fit of uncontrollable laughter. Here are a few.

Knock Knock. Who's there? Gordon. Gordon who? Gordon dog!
Knock Knock. Who's there? Cheese. Cheese who? Cheesy Banjo!
Knock Knock. Who's there? King of the Hill. King of the Hill who? King of the Hill Sausage!
Knock Knock. Who's there? Mouth. Mouth who? Mouth eating Can Treats!
and this morning...
Knock Knock. Who's there? Hat. Hat who? Hat is just up there on the top.

Twenty Years.

Twenty Fucking Years.

That is how long I waited to see Duran Duran in concert. My brother (13 years older) lost his idol status when he had tickets to the Arena tour when I was about 12 or 13, and he didn't take me. In fact, if memory serves me right, he didn't even go. ~sigh~

My friend Melissa got tickets for us, and we went. We were so excited. And, should we have been lucky enough to go backstage and make out with the band, we wouldn't even get in a cat fight, because she likes Roger and I like John. Perfect!

So the opening band Ima Robot pretty much sucked. Even the wine guy mentioned it, as he was gouging us $6 for wine and $7 for beer. We eventually went to our seats, which weren't terrible for buying them at the last minute. Finally the band came out, amidst lots of loud noise, all dressed in dark suits. It seemed a bit pretentious, like they took themselves too seriously, but that quickly passed. They were obviously having fun, Simon was hysterical, dancing around like he was James Brown or something. The set list was rockin': Sunrise, Hungry Like the Wolf, Hold Back the Rain (Ahh, now that was freakin' fabulous), Union of the Snake, Astronaut, Come Undone, I Don't Want Your Love, What Happens Tomorrow, Planet Earth, Tiger Tiger, Chauffeur (also wonderful), Ordinary World, Save a Prayer (Thank you Melissa for having a lighter so I could fulfill the sub-dream in this one), Nice, Notorious, Reflex (here is where I though, hey, this is the end of the set, they are putting a lot into this song), Careless Memories (!!!), Wild Boys (man, I still hate this song) - and then the encore... I wish I could verbalize the bass line here, and I thought, what the hell is this, this isn't a D2 song? Then I recognized the bass line - White Lines. Bitchin! \m/ Then Girls on Film, where Simon introduced the band, and we all got to chant "play that fucking bass, John". Then, to cap it off, Rio. So So So great. and cue big ~~sigh~~...... now.

Still riding high off of it, got my t-shirt and a set of cool buttons.

Here is a funny tidbit I found from their website: The United States Army discover the use of music was very successful in psychological warfare against their enemy. In 1989, the Bush Administration found it necessary to invade Panama to rid the country of General Manuel Noriega. To increase Noriega's tension and unease, the Army began to play a selection of loud music near his base, including Duran Duran's "Hungry like the Wolf."

OK, first off, this is Lesley. We are still trying to use Picasa to upload photos to blogger, but it isn't working well. We can only send one picture to a blog post at a time, and if you want a title and header, it seems you have to go back and edit it in. Hmmmmm. We were hoping it would work, so the preview to our buzznet account on the blog wouldn't usually be the same as the picture on the blog. Ah, well.

Anyway, took advantage of our lovely Oregon spring weather (nice and warm, mid 60's) to go geocaching. This one was really close to us on a closed PGE road running along the Clackamas. It was gorgeous, and we were smart because we brought the wagon, and could pull Owen the 3.4 miles instead of carry him. He had a lot of fun. Then fell asleep. Now my feet hurt. O asked me to cut his hair this weekend, so I did it this afternoon, but he wouldn't let me finish the top, so now he kinda looks like Tom Waits.




River View.



Marble Treasure!



Tuckered Out.

Was directed to this cool PSA (thanks Chris) put out by the NHLFA - the National Hockey League Fan Association.

Checked out the site a bit -a nice place for NHL news, especially on the CBA. Otherwise, not much there, except a fairly sucky message board. They do have 26,912 members, and it is free to register. The NHLFA is recognized by the NHL, so it is a place for fans to make their voices heard. Not that it will probably matter anymore, those stupid greedy bastards.